The Summer I Turned Pretty: Why even adults are secretly obsessed with the teen love triangle.

A few weeks ago I was at a party chatting with a bunch of other adult women about adult women things: work, apartments, dating, Bravo-lebrities. Destroyer of the world of one set of brothers in particular: Belly’s family stays every summer in an idyllic seaside town called Cousins with another family, which has two sons, the aforementioned Conrad and Jeremiah. But TSITP is no Euphoria, and it’s no Gossip Girl either—this show is earnest as hell, and doesn’t seem as if it was necessarily screaming “crossover” when it got greenlit. And something I’ve delighted in over the past few weeks is stumbling upon other adults posting about TSITP on social media, so many of these posts carrying an undertone of “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but … ” For example, there’s the TikTok whose text reads “Im a grown 30 year old woman … how does this show about a teenaged love triangle with a girl nicknamed a body part have such a hold on me”? Witness this man on TikTok suggesting that a more appropriate name for the show would be “The Summer You Turned Into a Ho” or this mother gasping disapprovingly over Belly: “She gives very mixed signals!” Another excellent mode of TSITP posts are the adult men who have been caught in the act appreciating, or at least getting invested in, the show’s plot: In this charming clip, a woman films her 29-year-old boyfriend persuading another male friend to watch it; in this one, you can watch a couple reacting to the show in real time, the camera capturing on their faces both the disgust and the more meta enjoyment over having such a strong reaction to a show for teens.